Exchange of the week
What is gained by excluding children from school?
To The Times
The well-informed comment on excluded pupils by Rachel Sylvester is a challenge to us all. Excluding a child from school may be a short-term expedient, but it usually comes with a substantial longterm cost. The behaviour that gives rise to the possibility of exclusion must surely be taken as a cry for help. Unless this is met with a clear and rigorous plan of help and support it is likely to result in greater vulnerability and alienation, which will have a marked and lasting impact on the adult of the future. Missing this opportunity to change young lives at this stage is in the interests of no one. Lord Laming, House of Lords
To The Times
Schools exclude pupils as a last resort, to enable them to give diligent students the education they deserve. A small minority of pupils can not only hinder and intimidate the vast majority of pupils wishing to learn and progress, it can also inflict intolerable stress on teachers attempting to do the job they were trained for.
Schools are there to educate and they must be allowed to exclude pupils. To suggest that disruptive individuals be kept in school to keep them off the streets seems absurd. Teachers do as much as they can, but there comes a point where further support or help for some individuals needs to be provided by specialists. If it is the case that these excluded individuals are more likely to join drug gangs and commit knife crime, then for the safety and well-being of the other pupils the sooner they are excluded from school the better. Once these pupils are excluded their behaviour can be appropriately dealt with outside the education system. M.A. Neilson, Edinburgh
To The Times
There is a further important dimension to Rachel Sylvester’s excellent article. Some 12 years ago, the Labour administration decided to separate childcare services from local government social services departments, and relocate them within their education departments. In one ill thought-through swoop, children were denied the protection of an independent agency whose objective was the pursuit of their broad welfare interests, and instead left in the hands of educationists who had many more responsibilities to discharge. It was a decision taken in the teeth of robust and emphatic professional and academic opinion that warned (accurately, as it has turned out) that the welfare interests of children could not be satisfactorily pursued in an environment whose principal duty was their education.
The welfare of children should always come first. Excluding them from school and abandoning them to a sometimes feral community does not put those interests first. Drew Clode, former policy/press adviser, Association of Directors of Social Services